Chrome 7 Arrives With Bug Fixes, Better HTML5 Support

In keeping with its recently accelerated release schedule, Google has released version 7 of its Chrome web browser for Mac, Windows and Linux. The latest release of Chrome offers hundreds of bug fixes and under-the-hood improvements like an updated HTML5 parser, but is light on the new features.
Chrome users should get the update automatically, […]

In keeping with its recently accelerated release schedule, Google has released version 7 of its Chrome web browser for Mac, Windows and Linux. The latest release of Chrome offers hundreds of bug fixes and under-the-hood improvements like an updated HTML5 parser, but is light on the new features.

Chrome users should get the update automatically, but if you’d like to download the new version directly, you can grab the browser from the Google Chrome download page.

The big news for this release is the huge number of bug fixes — hundreds have been fixed, though hundreds are still waiting. There are a few new features, like support for the HTML5 File API, which allows sites and web apps to read the content of local files. This should be a boon to web apps that rely on that feature. Also new is the ability for Chrome 7 to upload complete folders from your PC — very handy if you’ve got a lot of files to attach to an e-mail or dozens of pictures to upload. Unfortunately, the new feature relies on the HTML5 forms, which very few sites are using at the moment.

There’s also some new AppleScript support in the Mac OS X release, which means you can script Chrome or use it with OS X’s Automator tool.

Two things you won’t find in the stable release of Chrome 7 are the Hardware Acceleration and “Tabpose” features we looked at in the developer release. Both features are currently available in the developer builds of Chrome 8, though they may not make it to the stable release category until Chrome 9.